Hadi Saleh, international secretary of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU), who has been murdered aged 55, was a lifelong fighter for the rights of Iraqi workers to join and form trade unions of their choice and to organise to advance their interests.

Saleh was born in 1949, the year after Al-Wathbah (The Leap), the defining event in the birth of Iraq's organised working class, when railworkers in Baghdad joined students protesting against the Portsmouth Agreement, which gave Britain access to Iraqi airbases and oil revenues. Demonstrators chanted "Long Live the Republic" and 300 to 400 of them were massacred by police machine guns.

The monarchy purged the leadership of Iraq's new civil society movement: on February 14 1949, Yusuf Salman Yusuf, the general secretary of the Iraqi Communist party, known as Fahd (the leopard), and two politburo members were hanged in a Baghdad square. Hanna Batatu, modern Iraq's greatest historian records: "Fahd dead proved more potent than Fahd living. Communism became now surrounded with the halo of martyrdom."

These two extremes, the promethean leap of the Iraqi workers' movement and the subsequent martyrdom of Fahd, are present in the hope and tragedy of Hadi Saleh's life and death.

Saleh was a printer, his professional life brutally interrupted at the age of 20 by the second Ba'ath coup, when he was sentenced to death for independent labour activities, serving five years on death row before his sentence was commuted. He found refuge in Sweden, along with his wife and comrade Korea, with whom he had two children, Furat and Rafid, and where his grandchildren were born.

There, he helped establish the underground Workers' Democratic Trade Union Movement (WDTUM) in 1980. Known as Abu Furat, Saleh was hunted by the regime: at the WDTUM founding conference in Kurdistan, participants wore scarves concealing their identities.

Saleh opposed President Bush's war against Iraq. He returned home at considerable personal danger before the collapse of the Saddam Hussein dictatorship and worked tirelessly to end the occupation of his country, by democratic and popular means. He saw independent trade unions in Iraq as essential in this task.

In May 2003, Saleh and others formed the IFTU, which now represents over 200,000 members in the transportation, printing, construction, oil, electricity, railways and food production industries.

When a delegation of British trade unionists visited the IFTU in Baghdad, in October 2003, Saleh told us: "Saddam Hussein tried for 35 years to suppress trade unions; he turned his 'yellow unions' into instruments of repression and violence against workers. After the fall of the regime, both nationalist and democratic political traditions within trade unionism have tried to re-establish new trade unions based on democratic principles - not based on one political ideology."

A small-framed, dapper man with an intense gaze and an air of surprising calm, Saleh lived and breathed the history of the workers' movement, recalling with pride that: "The printing union in Iraq is considered one of the oldest. Historically, its members fought bitter struggles for the right to form their own union, a union that could defend their rights."

In January last year, Saleh visited London, outlining the problems facing Iraqi trade unionists, including the upholding under occupation of Ba'athist-era anti-union laws and attacks by US forces on IFTU offices. He told us: "There is a dire need to organise democratic structures. We need new progressive laws that recognise and guarantee workers' rights, and trade unions need to be involved in the formulation of any new labour laws."

In December, Saleh attended the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions congress in Miyazaki, Japan. His gentleness, charm and commitment to democratic, independent workers' organisation impressed all who met him. Interviewed about the risks in being a trade unionist, he admitted: "Yes, it's [a risk for] civil society organisations, including trade unions. Extremists who targeted those trade unionists, both teachers and engineers, killed them under the notion that they are collaborating with a state created by the Americans, so by definition those are collaborators and legitimate targets. We call on our brothers and sisters in the international community to support us to make sure that our rights in organising formal unions freely and openly are guaranteed and ensured."

Saleh was murdered after being tortured by a gang who broke into his Baghdad home. His IFTU comrades described the killing as bearing all the hallmarks of the former security services. His union files and membership records were ransacked.

When the history of Iraq's labour movement is written, Hadi Saleh's role will be prominent. Those of us who believe in his values must stand in solidarity with his fellow Iraqi trade unionists. Hadi Saleh understood that in Iraq, civil society institutions, particularly trade unions, are the key to preventing a repeat of the past. That is why he gave his life to the cause of the workers' movement.

Abdullah Muhsin writes: With the murder of Hadi Saleh, Iraqi working people have lost a courageous trade union leader who dedicated three decades of his life to fighting Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, to workers' rights and to the cause of a free, prosperous, democratic and federal Iraq.

His murder is an attack on the right of Iraqi workers to trade union representation. It is aimed at destabilising and undermining the development of trade unions as cornerstones of development and respect for human rights in post-Saddam Iraq.

In May 2003, Hadi was instrumental with the WDTUM in organising an open trade union foundation meeting in Baghdad, which led to the formation of the IFTU. He was a key political figure, providing mature analysis, an unshakeablebelief in democratic trade union values and boundless energy.

Hadi Saleh's commitment to trade unionism was a vital feature of his vision for a democratic, peaceful and federal Iraq, which would unite all Iraqis, regardless of their background, ethnicity or religion. For him, trade unions would be the key to achieving such unity. Thus he championed workers' rights to organise and to strike to achieve decent jobs, pay and working conditions: the basic building blocks of strong, non-sectarian trade unionism. Such a strategy remains the only way to defeat the IMF shock therapy and trans-national economic occupation, which has been imposed undemocratically on Iraqis by the occupying powers.

However, his commitment to independent trade unionism was also linked to his determination to end the occupation of our country and to rebuild civil society.

The IFTU points out that his murder forms part of a continuing programme of intimidation against workers and trade unionists. Hadi's IFTU comrades have been heartened in their grief by the response of the international labour movement, the ILO and peace movements across the world to demands that Iraq's interim government provide adequate protection for workers and their trade union representatives as they carry out their jobs.

· Hadi Saleh, trade unionist and communist, born 1949; died January 4 2005.